The Firing of Sam Altman

OpenAI and ChatGPT. Those two names may ring a few bells. Open AI, a stable, fast-moving, ground-breaking company, is led by the brilliant and ambitious Sam Altman. It created one of the most popular artificial intelligence websites, ChatGPT, which turned AI from a futuristic dream into a concrete reality. AI has changed the world, controversially, leading people to lose jobs but also reducing human error and producing better data analysis. These are only a few of the effects.

But on November 17th, 2023, things were very different. Ilya Sutskever and Helen Toner, both members of the board of Open AI, made a decision that would shake the tech world for months. They decided to oust Sam Altman.

 Sutskever wanted to take the process of making artificial intelligence slowly. He wanted to tread carefully to make sure everything was safe and secure. He wanted to avoid a world where robots and AI rule supreme. 

On the other hand, Altman is entrepreneurial. He has been the president of Y Combinator, a tech startup funder, and then CEO of Open AI. He wants to move forward quickly, developing AI faster, potentially with more risk. He even said, perhaps jokingly, “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies.” These different styles led to disagreements, which eventually led to Sutskever, Toner, and a few others kicking Altman out of OpenAI. Investors and employees were shocked. The board said that Altman was not “consistently candid” and that his “lack of transparency” made it difficult to supervise the company. Later, Sustkever regretted it and said, “I never intended to harm OpenAI.” On November 19, Sam Altman gave them until 5 pm to resign for him to come back.

Microsoft, one of the largest tech companies in the world, had invested $13 billion and owned 49 percent of OpenAI. It had invested in OpenAI partly because of Altman. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, was upset. Altman and former Open AI president Greg Brockman met with Nadella and discussed a possible move to Microsoft to help work on Microsoft’s AI. Several employees also quit to follow Altman and Brockman to Microsoft.

Later, nearly 500 OpenAI employees out of 770 threatened to leave the company if Altman was not reinstated. However, at the time the move to Microsoft was not official, and Brockman and Altman were still open to coming back.

In a meeting on Friday, Sutskever denied that kicking out Altman was a “hostile takeover” and that it was “making AI beneficial to humanity.” A few days later, Brockman quit; following Brockman, three senior researchers resigned.  

Two weeks later, Altman was reinstated and Sutskever and Toner resigned. And with that, calm returned to the tech world.